Cartoonist Ramirez, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, has attacked Palestinians before. In another cartoon, he plays on the slogan “Black Lives Matter”, to make it “Terrorist Lives Matter”, implying that the support that Black people in the United States have shown for Palestinians is tantamount to siding with Hamas.
Team Clarion
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Washington Post on Thursday took down a cartoon by Michael Ramirez that sparked outrage and was widely condemned as racist and dehumanising against Palestinians, acknowledging that it was divisive.
The cartoon, published on November 8, portrayed a Hamas representative – featured as a heavy-set man with a wide nose and dark eyes – tying four children and a woman in a hijab to himself with a speech bubble that read, “How dare Israel attack civilians…”.
“A cartoon we published by Michael Ramirez on the war in Gaza, a cartoon whose publication I approved, was seen by many readers as racist. This was not my intent,” Washington Post opinion editor David Shipley said in a note on the publication’s website.
“I saw the drawing as a caricature of a specific individual, the Hamas spokesperson who celebrated the attacks on unarmed civilians in Israel,” Shipley wrote. “However, the reaction to the image convinced me that I had missed something profound, and divisive, and I regret that.”
“Our section is aimed at finding commonalities, understanding the bonds that hold us together, even in the darkest times,” he added.
The cartoon in the newspaper’s opinion section triggered massive controversy and sparked anger over its “racist” and “orientalist” depiction of Arabs and Palestinians.
Titled, Human Shields, it depicted a man in a dark, striped suit, which has Hamas in bold white letters emblazoned on it, for the Palestinian group.
The man’s eyebrows are arched, and his nose is comically large. He has four children strapped to his body, including a baby positioned on his head. A woman – veiled and docile – and meant to represent Palestinian women, cowers behind him.
The man is lifting a finger and the thought cloud above him reads: “How dare Israel attack civilians …”. According to the cartoon, published on November 6, he is Hamas.
The title as well as the depiction of children and a woman tied to him, appear to reference allegations by Israel, which are often repeated by Western leaders and echoed by many mainstream media outlets, that Hamas uses human shields.
Next to the man, woman and children, who are flanked by a Palestinian flag, is a partial portrait of the Dome of the Rock in occupied East Jerusalem and beneath is an oil lamp.
Two days after publication of the cartoon, the outrage on social media, as well as the Washington Post’s website was growing.
On X, formerly Twitter, a user called the image “beyond vile, bigoted and dehumanising”.
Others said the dehumanisation was reminiscent of anti-Semitic cartoons that depicted Jews in a negative light.
“I can’t get over how this looks exactly like a traditional antisemitic character, just with a few modified features”, posted one user, while another wrote: “Notably this is exactly how they used to depict Jews in European newspapers in the 1930s.”
On the Post’s website, one reader commented: “Shame on Washington Post for using racist tropes that are currently being used to justify a genocide where majority killed are children. Dehumanising any peoples paves a way for injustices to occur. Unfortunate to see The Washington Post fuel that racist fire. This cartoon and the fact that it was published is appalling.”
The cartoon is reminiscent of those featured in the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo which were derogatory to Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).
Protests have erupted across the Arab and Muslim worlds over these images in past years.
In a letter to the newspaper, Philip Farah, founder and board member of the Palestinian Christian Alliance for Peace. said the cartoon was full of bias and prejudice. “Is the message meant to be that Israel is justified in bombing civilians? And is the Palestinian flag on one side of the cartoon meant to conflate Hamas with all Palestinians? And is the background photo — on the other side of the cartoon, of the Dome of the Rock meant to conflate Hamas ideology with Islam? Ramirez ought to have thought about these elements in the cartoon. They are offensive not only to Muslims but to me and all of my Palestinian Christian sisters and brothers,” he wrote
Cartoonist Ramirez, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, has attacked Palestinians before. In another cartoon, he plays on the slogan “Black Lives Matter”, to make it “Terrorist Lives Matter”, implying that the support that Black people in the United States have shown for Palestinians is tantamount to siding with Hamas.
